HockeyFan12

What is sound gripping? Given a normal sound mixed day rate ($2k-$10k union/$750+ non-union wet hire) I'd just bring the best of the best along every time.

Have you compared 444XQ from the Alexa vs ArriRAW? This is something that is very much worth investigating, but on a camera-by-camera basis.

Congrats on the plastic stuff! I'm impressed by the 55-250mm STM. The L is better, but its ergonomics are annoying. I find the IS on the STM to be the best for video that I've used. The Tamrons (old Tamron lenses, maybe not the new primes) have the strongest IS and lock on hard, but glitch a bit when panning and don't pan smooth. Great IS for stills, but not what I want for video. The 55-250mm STM has great IS, the best balance between stability and smoothness. The 70-200 II IS has good IS, too, but it's too front heavy for handheld use. It lacks any IS, but the 18-35mm f1.8 Sigma is a great lens nonetheless. I might sell mine since I'm leaving the business, but it's wonderful. A+. And wide enough you don't really need stabilization. It's all subjective. The union operators I know would never use an IS lens, but the rigs they carry (Alexas with big Angie zooms and counterweights) are prohibitively expensive and painstaking to operate and cause crippling back pain by the time you're 30. If I can't afford to hire a martyr like that, then I like IS lenses that don't lock on too hard but still smooth the drift, and the plastic EFS Canons are marvels in this regard. But still take a look at the 18-35mm and a shoulder rig or loupe on the LCD that offers a third point of contact, as a balanced rig with three points of contact will be smooth enough to not need IS at wide angles, while remaining light enough to not kill you. The 18-35mm Sigma is just great and a 50mm f1.8 and 85mm f1.8 will fill out your kit nicely if you get it. At 35mm and shorter, IS doesn't seem as necessary to me, anyway. I'd rather be on a Ronin. I love old Nikkors, but it's a whole different look. I think the older lenses offer almost a stop more DR because they're inherently low contrast but that's an issue, too, when it washes out your image. It's just an entirely different look. More physical. My preference. Not my clients'. So I'm quitting the business and selling everything but my old Nikkors. (And the plastic stuff. It's too good for the money.)

Crop APS-C to 2.35:1 and you'll be very close. Full frame is a much bigger sensor. Doesn't matter much given lens equivalencies, though. There are f1.2 and f1.8 prime sets for Super35 you can't get for APS-C so a full frame look might be closer in some cases, not that most people are shooting wide open (generally f2.8-f5.6 from what I have experienced).

I have a 70-200mm f2.8 II IS and just got a EF-S 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS STM. The L is nicer, sure, but mostly it's just two stops faster. The plastic STM is much more stable for me. Better IS and much better balanced. I'm blind to the enormous aesthetic differences you notice, I'll admit. To me it just looks slightly worse (bokeh fringe, cats eye, vignetting) and a lot slower. No big differences in micro contrast or rendering. But the L is certainly a beast. Beautiful beautiful image, even wide open.

I have a wide angle adapter I had machined to fit on my ISCO pre-36. With a 35mm lens it's somewhere around 17.5mm horizontal FOV equivalent. But you can't use diopters. Probably going to sell it eventually, but this is a good option for anyone willing to put in the time.

I think it will shoot 4k. 4k has really taken off on the very very low end, so for the videographer/enthusiast market there's value there. It won't feature Canon Log 2 or 15 stop DR. Too heavy to work with in post for most low end productions and arguably more than should have been packed into the C300 Mk II (most people in that range are well-served shooting 1080p on a C300 or FS7). I still don't see what all the fuss is. Only one or two of my clients (or clients of places where I work) demand 4k delivery and I can't see that changing in the near future.

Physicality.

With the C500, at least, the gain is applied on a per-channel basis, so even the RAW footage has a set white balance. The advantage being color is retained in the highlights (but not clipped as saturation is rolled off appropriately). It's not a big deal, though. Rarely a deal killer. The C series suffers from worse color rendering under tungsten than under daylight, anyway.

All fading in from black cleanly really points to is that whatever program you're working in is working in a >8bit space and/or your grain management is appropriate to avoid dithering. But your argument remains true in general, the shadows do fall apart in AVCHD and it can be quite bad. The 14 bit vs 8 bit thing, however, is overstated (most of that extra information is noise and we're comparing 8 bit log vs 14 bit linear–of which more than two bits are filled with just noise–which narrows the gap dramatically), but it's an advantage for the 5D definitely The 8 bit banding issues people have generally relate to problems with their post workflow. Canon Log is well-implemented. AVCHD does block up in the shadows, though, definitely, and RAW does not. I'm not saying the 5D has a bad image, or that it's worse in every respect. It really might be the best for the money and have the best look out of the box. Most consumers are more familiar with ACR than they are with Resolve, and so it's no surprise that despite the arcane workflow, many find the 5D to be the easiest path to a great image. The highlights thing is simple. Shoot a 3200K source that's blowing out and try to recover it in ACR. You'll see desaturated fringes, as with any traditional RAW still. Not a big deal, but you do lose 1/2 stop or so of DR when your white balance isn't set to 5600K.

This just isn't true if you know how to expose properly. There's a tendency to over-expose the CX00, but its image is better overall than the 5D III RAW (and yes I've owned both since they were released, and no I don't think either is TOTL amazing, either). The CX00 is cleaner, has better DR, has better noise texture, is sharper, has better color rendering for video and holds highlight saturation properly, etc. The lack of "full frame" look is subjective and that does favor the 5D for most users who like that look. This is a common myth spread by people without light meters lol. Having owned both and used both on the same shoots, I'd frequently hear this myth repeated and was dumbfounded. Had any of these people actually A/Bd the cameras with proper exposure settings and proper handling of super whites? You'll quickly notice that the 5D RAW's highlights desaturate in an unsightly way when pulled back in ACR whereas the 100-109 IRE range from AVCHD recovers very cleanly, leading not only to better DR overall, but to proper color retention in the highlights without chroma clipping (as Sony and Panasonic exhibit). The issue is that people tend to vastly overexpose the CX00. C LOG puts 18% gray at 32 IRE or something, VERY low. RAW is gamma agnostic, but exposing the 5D like you'd expose a normal dSLR works well and leads to a pleasant over/under even exposing by eye. You can't do this with a log gamma and WideDR has its own problems. That said, it also shows how a more difficult workflow leads to a better image. I work with a lot of poorly shot CX00 footage and most of the 5D RAW footage I see online looks great. I think it's more intuitive to expose the 5D but harder to do everything else, its workflow demands attention and the practice of shooting with it is a little more rigorous. People get better results because they put in more work setting up shots and in post and because the exposure is more intuitive for those making the leap from a dSLR.

At home: Calibrated HP Dreamcolor driven by a BM intensity interface, $4k rec709 calibrated Panasonic LCD projector with brand new OEM bulb, calibrated ST60 Panasonic Plasma (CNET's highest rated tv of all time), HD650 headphones driven through a high end tube amp and high end dual Wolfson DAC, DT1350s and a portable amp/dac, 7506s, Stax electrostatic headphones At work: Calibrated 27" ultra sharp, other uncalibrated dell monitors for GUIs, calibrated 5k retinas iMacs, Flanders Scientific for color correction for tv, M Audio monitors, 7506s, etc. depending on where I am working at the time. Obviously we never do any heavy duty mixing in house with such anemic sound gear Lol I still do most of my work on my rMBP's shitty non-calibrated display though and mostly use the high end gear for playing PS4 while massively high on edibles. Surprisingly the rMBP screen is good enough to judge most work other than color correction or something. You don't need crazy high end gear. I do really enjoy watching blu rays on the big screen, though, and listening to music on the HD650s.

I agree with most of what you've written. I think there are well-made movies that feel like video games and well-made video games that feel like movies. But I prefer Spielberg's blockbusters to anything Marvel (or anyone, really) has produced recently and while the Uncharted games, for instance, are fun (and look amazing!), the limited gameplay and ludonarrative dissonance are real problems. (Edge of Tomorrow and Avatar, however, are interesting and quite good specifically because of the ways they adapt video game “rules” to the film language. I like both, even though both are flawed.) I think there’s a historical precedent for other media (painting and early photography) resembling each other immediately before “diverging,” as you put it, and I look forward to seeing what’s next with video games, vr, and movies. Hopefully not more of the same! That said, theory is only good until practice contradicts it. And Yedlin’s Nuke script (from what I hear from those who've used it) is very impressive and could fool almost anyone, as do a lot of today’s visual effects fly completely under the audience's radar. My experience with the Alexa indicates that it’s the technical equal of film or better, and aesthetically it is great, too, and can be made to look like film. What you can get for $3000 in a digital camera is WAY beyond what you could get for $3000 shooting film or video years ago, and it wasn't until 5218 and digital scans that film had dynamic range to compete with film (as we know it) lol. Film is not technically better so much as it's ontologically distinct. Furthermore, sometimes it’s not even so much about the medium as about the approach certain tools encourage you to take. No offense, but likely the bigger problem with the 1DC clip you shot at the E.T. house is that it wasn’t shot by Spielberg’s crew. The best crew with the best lighting and the best post house could still do wonders with lesser or different resources. Craftspeople still matter more than their tools. But yeah I’d take 35mm over any digital camera if I had to choose what I wanted to see, and given unlimited resources, it’s what I’d want to use, too. (Digital made to look specifically digital has its merits, too. The ephemeral quality of physically empty media is well-served by snapchat, vine, and certain YouTube vlogs.) But I hope to see a return to physicality and emotion in blockbuster films; even the lip service JJ Abrams paid promoting Force Awakens (which did have some great moments, and Abrams does have a better understanding of Spielberg's blocking than any of his contemporaries) indicates that there's a desire for a distinctly filmic experience to reemerge in the commercial mainstream.

Paying rent.

Unity engine? I have no idea (except that many people I know getting started in the industry are jumping ship and learning Unity instead). To me, it's a completely separate medium. But Marvel movies are already full of CGI action and ads are loaded with invisible vfx. Contemporary films already feel a lot like video games, my hope is that Unity and VR (which are their own thing, and incredibly awesome) allow film to get back to what it does well, which is record an event in a more physical and emotional way. I think film feels too much like video games already, and I see the two media diverging in the future (with VR becoming the dominant medium eventually).

While I disagree with this list on the whole (pretty strongly, but it's all subjective), I'm glad to hear the GH5 is as good as promised. I wanted to love the GH4 but it wasn't quite there in so many respects... maybe I will have to pick up a GH5 when they come down in price. The slow motion alone and ability to shoot high res plates is exciting to me, but I was worried issues with low light etc. would persist as well as ergonomics and strange crop factor and IQ issues. How do you find the high ISOs compared with the rest? How is the slow motion quality?

I hope it's clear that despite using a concrete number, I mean this as a pretty arbitrary statement. I actually recently wrote a post on reduser strongly defending the F35 and if you've got one I am envious, it's a great camera and I don't mean to attack it. It's the benchmark so far as I'm concerned for "adequate 35mm film replacement" and there are areas where it's still ahead (motion cadence, for one). But there's a lot out there at much lower prices that can compete pretty well with it, hence its precipitous drop in price on the used market. That said, it beats anything on this list for sure for a beautiful organic image and quite good specs too–but by less than I think most people realize.

I thought they were down to a lot less now. I think you'd be surprised how much the MX has aged. It was good for its time and put Red on the map (the original sensor was too slow/noisy to be useable and was unusable with tungsten light using the old processing) but the DR is no better than your F3 and you need substantially more light to get a clean image. Alexas are down to around $17k for a kit and are in another league entirely from any Red. You can rent Epics here for a couple hundred bucks a day so I'd just do that rather than buying one but it depends on your market. Depending on what you're after you might love it but also might not. With some work it can produce an awesome image.

I found it to be superior technically to the Epic MX when shooting both side by side with the same lenses. Better DR and less low light noise, truer color, no magenta highlights, same resolution once downscaled to 1080p and not too far apart in the first place (4k with heavy anti-aliasing vs 2.8k or something). However, the Epic has a "thicker" quality to it that is more cinematic when treated appropriately. It and the FS100 are really solid for the money. A lot of crews shooting network promos are using these I believe.

The red also has (had) poor color rendering, burned in magenta highlights, very bad noise and color and low light performance under tungsten, 90 second boot time, not just poor weight but poor ergonomics, and was for a while very unreliable. The 720p signal I also found insufficient for pulling focus, but it sounds like they've fixed that. That said, there is a history of great imagery coming from that camera from people who lit well and treated it extensively in post. It does have a pretty "thick" tonality after some noise reduction and when lit aggressively. The Dragon, for instance, has a beautiful image when exposed at 200 ISO and prevented from clipping. The 1DC/5D thing is a matter of opinion. I can respect that of course. The 11.5 stops comment is appropriate, the 5D RAW really is in a pretty high echelon in terms of everything and is only limited by DR but still to a figure far surpassing most in its class. Too bad it's a pain in the ass to work with when your client wants playback or you're trying to run multiple video feeds or you only have one take and want to make sure it hasn't screwed something up. Maybe the newer hack is more bulletproof. If time isn't money, it is a good option. But a corrupted file or out of focus file is another very real form of poor image quality. On the other hand, I have had very bad noise problems with the BMPC4K but different cameras have been different (some worse than others). Either way it has 8-9 stops of DR and is very noisy but otherwise the image is quite good I agree. If you can control your light very carefully it and the digital bolex are good. But the 2.5k seems to have superior DR to others in its class. Just my opinion based on observation, the 2.5k is the only camera I'd put in the same class as the 1DC/5D RAW but with caveats (aliasing, small sensor size, qc issues, ergonomics). You don't. I shot a promo and portion of a feature for NBC on the 5D RAW and would continue to use it if I kept it. But when your client asks for playback on set or you only have one take of something (such as interviewing a famous actor, etc.) it can be problematic. I also find the post workflow very slow. The A7S, GH4, and 5D RAW have all proved too unreliable for me when time is money but they are excellent when it isn't. The Alexa and CX00 are the only cameras I worked with which haven't gone down under reasonable conditions (though I've seen both go down). Then again, I'm also working with clients that are too big but also too small to demand 4k. (Mostly network tv, ads, etc. Only Netflix can afford 4k.) Just curious–what kind of content and at what budget level are you working? I wouldn't bring it to a 250k/day set, but I might bring it as a b camera there for non-essential b roll. Personally I wouldn't use it as an a camera on anything but I suppose if you have the workflow to support it more power to you! It is a bit soft still, but really not bad. I'm not interested in arguing about what works for you or doesn't, just providing a different opinion on what has worked for me. Hopefully the OP can see what use cases are closest to his own and make an appropriate choice. Obviously if you are happy with what you have then it is the best for you, I wish I had the same experiences but have not. The best option is to rent and run tests of course.

Disagree. Just because the Bolex, 4k, and Red One MX are a pain to work with doesn't mean you get much in exchange for your troubles. The 1DC does seem very good for the money. The image will be "thicker" with a nicer color palette. 5DMKIII RAW is quite good (on par with C300 and Red MX but with FF compatibility and a tiny camera body) if all you care about is spending very little and getting a lot. The image is very nice. But the workflow is unacceptable for most professional or serious use. It's a cool tech demo for making impressive videos, not a real shooting platform. This might be fine for you. But the caveat of usability is tremendous here, if it's even 1% of your criteria, I would dismiss this option. But you say it's 0%, in which case give it some consideration if you see a used one cheap. If you're only chasing image quality for the money, it would be a good pick. If not, the 1DC would be fine or a CX00 or FS100/F3 (easy to use and the image with those is on par with the Red MX–unless you need 4k–and with much improved low light and better color out of the box and mixed light color). Any of these cameras (excepting maybe the BMPC4k, which has fixed pattern noise problems, the 2.5k has a much cleaner image) are great. To the extent that any problem with the image is due to user error. Or simply preference. (Resolution means nothing to me beyond 1080p but color means everything. I'll take tonality over DR. This is not the case with many people.) Anything from this generation is 95% of the way to the F35 and far better than the F900. You can get "Hollywood" results with an F3 or a C300 or even a BM 2.5k though lenses become trickier with it. But by the time you're spending that much on G&E and support gear it's trivially inexpensive to upgrade to an Alexa. But even Canon dSLRs, which are technically very poor, are intercut seamlessly (as b cameras) with top of the line content. The 7D on a techno crane was a thing for a while because it was "good enough" to replace the Red as a b camera or a camera for some ads–but easier to use. (Those days have passed.) I would say all these options are within a 20% margin in terms of image quality and 5% for most of those listed. But in terms of ergonomics there is a vast one. And in terms of flexibility, use under mixed light, etc. also a vast one. But if you're just shooting test scenes or charts, I suppose the 1DC still wins. If part of the image quality is how in focus your footage is, how the colors look under mixed light, how the viewfinder lets you compose, how often the camera goes down on a shoot that's expensive per minute or simply if you value your time, and what kind of camera movement the body lets you use, then my answer might be very different. But a simple question will get you simple answers: 1DC. But whatever, they're all great.

This. Also move to a major city and network. Assistant editors or roto/paint artists–anyone who knows Avid or Nuke exceptionally well–can get work very very easily in LA, Vancouver, etc. But they will ONLY be assistant editors or roto/paint artists... to start... Good salary and good for getting in the door, though. Better to be an aspiring editor who's in the field making money and contacts than an aspiring editor in your parents' basement even if it means logging footage. (In theory.) Most generalists come across as aspiring directors, which I think most probably are... but if you wear too many hats you're judged by the one that fits worst. Most people won't watch a reel over a minute, or more than ten seconds if the work starts less than outright spectacular, but you also can't demonstrate a million aptitudes in that time. So even specialists will have multiple reels for multiple even more rarified specialties. And those will pay even more. We're talking five figures a week if you do one thing very very well, even a pretty standard, learnable craft like cutting, grading, particle simulations, or comp, or a commercial dp or fabricator, whatever. Specializing is good. (You'll still yearn to direct, though.) That said if all the work is spectacular or the sum of your work is spectacular you can get representation to direct right off the bat. Make $40k/day and save money doing your own post, too. It's a nice life I'm sure.

I really don't know. I know people who are doing this kind of work and getting those rates, but not how they got there or what their job entails beyond standard DIT work. Seems to be twenty-somethings with good social skills, extroverts, who are hard-working (or at least reliable) end up in that role. I think it's a networking thing more than anything. I've only seen this kind of work pop up in the Bay Area and LA, where the flip-side is an impossibly high cost of living, and where someone knows a DP or something. It's also a job that's being threatened by union issues (and the fact that it's often not necessary, whereas you're always going to need a great AC) so I don't see many aspiring career DITs, more people taking it as a step toward DPing or something.

Absolutely. You will save $17k in post on one feature alone. And it's always been an affordable rental.

Most very low budget (under $10 million) features and indies shoot prores. What's more remarkable is the success of such an inexpensive movie. The Alexa's prores looks 99.9% as good as its RAW and 10X better than most other cameras regardless of recoding format. The difference between prores 422 and 4444 is probably bigger than Alexa prores vs Codex. RAW is not a distribution format or a format that you can see without it first being processed. RAW must be processed eventually and the in-camera processing is very excellent on the Alexa. It's not that the 5D makes a better RAW file than a JPEG; it's that the 5D turns out a worse JPEG than a high end PC turns out a .TIFF from the RAW. The 5D's built in processing needs to be quick and dirty to stay fast and consume minimal power. And this carries over doubly to the 5D's terrible built in video. But an Alexa has that high end PC built in (why it's so big and heavy and battery hungry) and beyond that you're going to a high quality intermediate codec, which you'd go to anyway for vfx, same as you'd go to a TIFF to get to Photoshop. So you're getting the equivalent of a 16 bit TIFF processed with the best settings of the best RAW developer, and that's the best you can get from RAW anyway. It just happens to happen in camera with the Alexa. RAW is not an image until it's processed, so what's being debated isn't even the superiority of the format but where the processing is done. It is done poorly in a 5D. It is done well on a high end PC. And it's done well in an Alexa. Unfortunately, this issue became politicized when Red marketed a problem (you need to offload the image processing because the early Reds lacked the power to debayer properly in-camera) as a feature ("in camera RAW"). Unfortunately it's still politicized and people are ignoring that this is among the least important aspects of technical image quality. The DIT discussion is also politicized. It's a contentious position from both sides. Decent rates ($1k/day is very low for wet hire) that take others years to earn and an attack from producers trying to devalue the position on low budget work. Most of these politics do not relate to enthusiasts (same as Arri raw vs prores) except to further largely unrelated business interests by changing how conventional wisdom perceives something's value.